Careful What You Publish – Words Live Online for a Long, Long Time

Online privacy has been a concern for years but only in recent years, with the explosive growth of the social web, has the concern grown about a person’s own words coming back to harm him or her in the future. That’s because nearly everyone is using the social web these days, and many are only just beginning to realize that what they publish today could still be found in a Google search years from now.

Newstex syndicates the authoritative content from Thomson Reuters’ podcast, Legal Current, about the business and practice of law, and this week, an interview with Jeffrey Rosen delved into online privacy and the problems associated with exposing too much of oneself in the digital space. Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University whose article about online privacy, “The End of Forgetting,” appeared in The New York Times Magazine in July.

In Rosen’s interview with the Legal Current podcast, he explains, “The right to privacy tends to cover only the outrageous or the untrue postings, things that are highly offensive to a reasonable person. But when you’re talking about embarrassing or truthful information, there’s not a clear legal right to escape it or to have people take it down.” You can follow the link to listen to the complete podcast interview with Jeffrey Rosen on Legal Current. It’s well worth it!

Interestingly, the timing for the Legal Current interview with Rosen couldn’t have been more appropriate. Just last week, I watched an episode of The Colbert Report that discussed this very topic with the tongue-in-cheek humor viewers expect from host Stephen Colbert. You can watch the segment clip below (or view it here if the video doesn’t play for you).